Dong Xuan DeMarket

The Dong Xuan Center lives on the eastern outskirts of Berlin, just shy of the Germo-Vietnamese border. Three huge hangars house hundreds of vendors hawking every oddball item you never realized you needed, along with some excellent viet-food.

On the Road to Dong Xuan

After getting off the tram, we walked through an unmarked ornamental gate and ended up in a mostly vacant market hall just for shoes. It was well worth the wrong turn…

Entering the China Schuhe Center

A Vacant Hall

Not a soul nor a banana peel to be found.

A Cubical Window

Oddly Gussied Up Stairs

But lo, could it be that someone lives here?

At the Gates

After asking directions from a lonely shoe salesmen with a lightning bolt of snow white hair, we walked around the corner to find the realDXC.

On the Mudflats

We made our way across a large muddy field toward what looked to be barbecue smoke rising in the distance. We nearly lost our shoes in a patch of quicksand. Fortunately, two attentive little boys were on the scene to mock us and chide me for dropping the “S-word”. Thank you, little boys.

Undeterred, we finally passed through the rubber flap front door of Hall One and were immediately bowled over by the scope and scale of odd stuff for sale. These products make you feel very close to the sweatshop. Perhaps to cut costs, some vital voice of reason has been eliminated from the value chain, leaving the misguided factory bosses to churn out hundreds of Porky-Pig-on-Porky-Pig adult action sculptures and cumbersome dildo lighters that fill up from the business end.

Good Beer Truck, Bad Beer Truck

Little toy beer trucks abound! No wonder they keep turning up at the flea markets. We saw beer trucks with five trailers and tiny toy cases of beer. There is a beer truck for every occasion–from making it up to your kids to making it up to your buddies.

5 Rows Packed with Petals

Between the fake flower stalls and nail salon supplier shops there are a few fine supermarkets with huge tanks of leaping carp that splash passers byà la Marine World. We picked up some new mango varieties, a rack of pork ribs for 3 euro, and good bao. We skipped the durian this time around.

A Bin of Fish

Starving and unsure of where best to eat, we tracked an outdoor grill full of great smelling pork to its companion restaurant at the southernmost end of Hall Two. We ate that barbecue pork (#8) and a very good bowl of beef phở (#18) which was recommended by our kindly waitress.

Thank you, Dong

We decided to abstain from a few tough to resist impulse buys, confident that we’d soon be back. The best find of the day however, wasn’t in any vendor stall; it was out behind the dumpsters. There, on top of a rat-infested pallet of sour milk, we found a mammoth plastic head of the Haribo candy boy. Diamond in the rough! We nabbed it and struck out for the tram.